I have some ex-Amazon friends who work down near where my sister lives. When I went to visit her last December, I caught up with a couple of them and listened to what they had to say about the innards of some of the claims processing systems that the ... entire country relies on. If core banking is an exercise in computer science history from the 1970s, well, what my friends are propping up is an exercise in computer science history from the 1960s.

I find it completely fascinating, and long before I heard about VaultOS, I couldn't help thinking that banks had a comparable problem (basically create something that can be adjusted in deeply unpredictable ways to comply with changes in the regulatory environment, must scale to enormous, and be hyper reliable. And careers end -- sometimes in prison sentences -- when things go wrong). I'm super excited to hear that people are working the banking side.

Maybe they'll go work on the other problem next! It's the only thing I see in the world around me that is enough to tempt me out of retirement, not because of any kind of "cool" factor, but just because of the sheer importance to our civilization continuing successfully. I would so prefer for someone else to fix it before I actually decided to go get a job.